A storm in a literary cup

The literary slugfest between Indian author Pankaj Mishra and British historian Niall Ferguson has provoked much angst and a little amusement.

Here’s the background: Ferguson, currently the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, wrote Civilization: The West and the Rest earlier this year. Ferguson is regarded as one of the world’s most unabashedly right-wing historians. Civilization: The West and the Rest, however, evoked little controversy till Pankaj Mishra, who divides his time between London, Delhi and Shimla, wrote a scathing review of it recently in the London Review of Books. He dismissed Ferguson as “homo atlanticus redux”, a “retailer of emollient tales about the (West’s) glorious past” and “a historian whose books are known less for their original scholarly contribution than for containing some provocative counterfactuals.” Mishra summed up Civilization: The West and the Rest as “gallimaufry” and said Ferguson’s acknowledgements of colonial misdeeds was “very selective.”

Ferguson responded swiftly. He raged against Mishra’s review, calling it “a crude attempt at character assassination” that not only “mendaciously misrepresents my work but also strongly implies that I am a racist.” He asked Mishra for a public apology for a “libellous and dishonest article.”

Mishra’s reply was equally swift: “Ferguson is no racist,” he conceded, but he has a “pathological” instinct to “bow down before the conqueror of the moment” and a predilection to say “whatever seems resonant and persuasive at any given hour.”

Ferguson meanwhile also vented his spleen on the London Review of Books (LRB), accusing it of “left-learning politics” and “intellectual dishonesty” and sought an unequivocal apology.

Cut through the clutter: How does Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest measure up? Mishra is largely right that the book is weakly argued and glosses over what he terms Western “misdeeds”.

Misdeeds? An understatement if ever there was one. But then Mishra is married to Mary Mount, a cousin of British Prime Minister David Cameron. Mishra’s father-in-law is an old Etonian, Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet, and a former head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit. It is to be hoped that such filial connections with the Anglo-Saxon establishment in Britain and America do not stay Mishra’s hand. We need more robust critics like Mishra to expose the mediocrity of some of the work that comes out of the West.

Way before the Mishra-Ferguson kerfuffle, I reviewed Civilization: The West and the Rest in the Sunday Times of India. Here’s an excerpt from the review so that you can judge for yourself how the book measures up:

Civilization: The West and the Rest is an ambitious book. Its central argument is that Western civilization forged ahead of the rest of the world after 1500 AD because it deployed six “killer applications”: science, medicine, consumerism, competition, property rights and the work ethic.

Ferguson understandably does not dwell on six other “killer” applications that marked the West’s post-1500 AD encounter with the east: slavery; invasive European settlements in the New World; colonisation of Asia and Africa; genocide of the Aborigines; indentured labour; and the displacement of indigenous peoples in North America. These were killer applications as well – all six of them. Each advanced the prosperity of the West – though not in the way Ferguson’s book sets out – and broke the back of the East.

“If, in the year 1411, you had been able to circumnavigate the globe,” Ferguson writes, “you would probably have been most impressed by the quality of life in Oriental civilizations. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing, while work had begun on reopening and improving the Grand Canal; in the Near East, the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople, which they would finally capture in 1453. The Byzantine empire was breathing its last. By contrast, Western Europe in 1411 would have struck you as a miserable backwater, recuperating from the ravages of the Black Death – which had reduced population by as much as half as it swept eastwards between 1347 and 1351 – and still plagued by bad sanitation and seemingly incessant war. In England the leper king Henry IV was on the throne, having successfully overthrown and murdered the ill-starred Richard II.

“And yet it happened. For some reason, beginning in the late fifteenth century, the little states of Western Europe, with their bastardized linguistic borrowings from Latin (and a little Greek), their religion derived from the teachings of a Jew from Nazareth and their intellectual debts to Oriental mathematics, astronomy and technology, produced a civilization capable not only of conquering the great Oriental empires and subjugating Africa, the Americas and Australasia, but also of converting peoples all over the world to the Western way of life.”

Ferguson ends his book by conceding that Western civilization is today declining to its pre-1500 AD subordinate position vis-à-vis China and India. Clearly, Western ascendancy was a historical blip created by the six “killer applications” Ferguson rather flippantly bases his book on – and the six other “killer” applications (including the colonial occupation of India) he largely ignores.

Conclusion? Pankaj Mishra got it dead right.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .

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Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .